An Atheist Goes To Church

I’ve been attending church at the First Christian Church in Olympia, Washington, semi-regularly for the last few months. For those of you that don’t know, I am not anything resembling a Christian. Though I am not very hardcore about it, I basically qualify as an atheist. My past, growing up in the Christian Church has been “exquisitely” documented in my song “Wibblin’ for Jesus,” performed with The True Olympians on our 12 New Recordings album. So what’s the scoop? What am I doing there?

Oly Mountain Boys

Well it goes kinda like this: Several months ago I went to the First Christian Church on a Friday afternoon to see the Oly Mountain Boys, Thurston County Commissioner Ty Menser’s bluegrass band. I quite like them and they graciously backed me up on “Grandma Caught The Shark” on my Olympia: A True Story album. While the First Christian Church has been having Friday afternoon concerts several times a year for eons, I’d not been there in a very long time. When the Boys got done I hung around for a little bit to say hello to bassist Phil Post, who’s was going through some health issues, and I wanted to see how he was doing. To my surprise a fellow came in, Dennis Nothway, sat down at the organ and started to play. I was informed by a woman who was a church member that I needed to be a lot less loud in my chatting because the organ player was there to practice and it was his time, so keep the noise down.

I was surprised, perhaps even flabbergasted, to hear this organ played. I knew it well. The First Christian Church is sort of, kinda, my family church. It wasn’t my mother’s church but it was my grandparents’ church. They were married in that church. Both their funerals were held in that church. I’ve sung in that church for my Aunt Jean’s wedding when she remarried. My Grandma worked many years for the church as the church secretary when I was a kid, so we were down there often.

In the church, there is a stained glass window that is dedicated to her little sister Charity, who died at the age of 13. The family paid whatever you had to pay to dedicate a window for her. So I’ve got some history with the place and I know the sound of that organ. If there is one song more than any that I associate with that organ, it is “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” written by Martin Luther in 1527. So powerful, so awesome. Amen.

Hearing that organ that day set off a little bomb in my brain. I wanted to record that organ and make an album of that organ. That process is just about ready to start and that’s a whole nother interesting story in itself. I’ll fill ya in on that later.

I decided I needed to start attending church because when the day came that I would ask if I could record in their church on their organ, I wanted the church membership to go, “He’s okay, sure, why not?”.

So I’ve been attending church semi-regularly for the last three months or so, not every week, every other week, sometimes three weeks in a row. It depends on what else is going on. I’ve gotten to know these people a little bit.

The First Christian Church, like many churches in America, is a church with an aging, mostly white congregation. They are pretty lefty and do a lot of community service in Olympia, helping homeless folks and other good things. They’re considering the future and what will happen as their congregation continues to age and eventually move on to their next Holy way station. I’ve participated in those discussions a little bit. It’s sort of interesting.

Attending services has not been a neutral activity for me. Simply sitting in that room in that chapel has emotional baggage. It’s not just an intellectual thing where I remember this happened there and that happened there. It’s a more ancient lizard-brained reaction of it seeming like a powerful experience to me. It’s kinda weird.

When I’m there and I listen to a sermon, sometimes I wish I could sign up, that I could get with their program, just because it feels kind of like it’s something maybe nice to have God come fix all the problems in the world (not that He does). I don’t sign up. I don’t do it.

When they have communion every week, I don’t participate. I am not part of the gang in that regard.

I love singing the songs. Some of them I know, so then I can make up harmonies in the cool places. Some of them I don’t know at all and so I’m doing just like people who don’t read music have been doing in churches forever. They are kind of mumbling along and getting the hang of the tune. Always better by verse two. I like doing that too.

One of the things they do every week is, everybody in the whole church shakes everybody else’s hands and says “praise be to you” or stuff like that, which is a nice, inclusive thing to do. You get to know people a little bit if you keep doing that every week and even somebody with a terrible memory like me finally starts to learn some people’s names.

Next Saturday we will start the recording process for the organ album down at First Christian. It’s going to last a month or two. I’m sure I’ll keep attending church while that process is going on. Will I start recording their concerts that they do down there just for fun? Maybe. Will I put on a Christmas spectacular or something there? Who knows. Will I say thanks and see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya? Could be.

The future is unwritten.